Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald
On Trump at Maccas, his happy place
McDonald’s is the place to rock,
It is a restaurant where you buy food to eat,
It is a good place to listen to the music,
People flock here to get down to rock music!
— Wesley Willis, “Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s,” 1995
“This is not a normal situation, is it, huh?”
– Donald Trump, serving a customer at a McDonald’s drive-thru, 2024
There’s a commercial from 2002 where then celebrity-tycoon Donald Trump questions Grimace from McDonald’s as to how they can afford to sell a Big and Tasty for just a dollar. “How do you do it,” Trump asks, “what’s your secret?”. Grimace stares back at him blankly before responding with two loud xylophonic blinks. “Mmhmm,” Trump nods, as the ad cuts to a narrator explaining the ins and outs of the dollar menu (“got a buck? You’re in luck!”) over a sumptuous burger montage. We cut back to Trump and Grimace with their backs to us, standing behind Trump’s desk, looking out over central park. Trump puts his arm around his purple compatriot, and says: “together Grimace, we could own this town.”
Twenty-two years later and now former President Donald Trump is serving fries at a drive-thru at a McDonald’s franchise in the Pynchonically named Feasterville, Pennsylvania. It is a stop on a reelection campaign that has had the ebb and energy of a hot afternoon spent sniffing modelling glue. He is there largely out of spite, having gotten stuck on Vice President Kamala Harris claiming to have worked at a McDonald’s one summer in 1983, a minor factoid Trump has described as “a huge lie, because McDonald’s was part of her whole thing.”
“I’ve now worked here for fifteen minutes more than Kamala,” he told supporters while waving at them through the drive-thru window, wearing the same vacant smile of his one-time business associate, Grimace, as well as a staff apron.
It is clear to everyone that he is having the time of his life.
“That’s great isn’t it, huh?” he says to a coworker after serving a family of fans, “how cute is it?”
Understandably, she has no idea how to respond.
Not unlike the McDonaldland mascots of the 1980s, Donald Trump is adorable. A controversial sentiment, I know. It is difficult to explain to self-serious liberals and fart-huffing MAGA-chuds alike, but those of us who consume an unhealthy amount of Trump content eventually reach what can be called ‘The Hamburlger Horizon,’ a place of uncanny, dare I say rapturous, unreality that completely rewires your brain. Intake enough clips of him spacing out to Ave Maria, describing big strong men coming to him with tears in their eyes, and telling children that their belief in Santa Claus is “marginal,” and you’ll reach this peculiar corner of content flavour country, and there, find something close-enough to peace.
Gradually, you’ll start to realise not who Donald Trump is, but what he is: the ultimate American. A gene-spliced hamburger man. A perfect distillation and impossible realisation of that purest of American originalities — the cartoon.
As one, he is on par with Elmer Fudd, Homer, and Popeye’s J. Wellington Wimpy. Like Mickey Mouse, he is a simple signifier for American fascism, imperialism, and infantilization. Like Bugs Bunny, he enters every space with an anarchic curiosity, as if he’s just stepped out of Toontown and is experiencing things in 3D for the first time.
To watch him is not dissimilar to watching old episodes of Ren & Stimpy. Crass, chaotic, willfully dumb as hell, but containing within it a vast and undeniable artistry — a mode of genius beyond the reach of adult imagination or sound minds.
Again like Bugs, Trump is a combo of untethered meanness and freewheeling daydreaming. What was a media stunt designed to operate as a backhand slap to his opponent turned into a joyous outing for this septuagenarian SpongeBob, who took to the deep-fryer with a giddy boyishness, like a sorcerer’s apprentice being let in on arcane mysteries that have fascinated them from afar their entire life. Just listen to him wax lyrical about serving french fries:
“I’ll never forget this experience, ok? Now I know how to do it, and it’s very good. But you know what? It’s beautiful. It’s clean, it’s really nice, you never touch them. I always figured someone stuffs them in with their hand, and I don’t like that. And they don’t do it that way, you never touch them. It’s really great.”
Here is a man who has never worked a day in his life, has most likely never cooked a meal for himself (outside of cooking show guest spots), and whose lifetime of wealth has cotton-balled him away from the banal day to day labours of existence that they appear to him as a marvel, both wondrous and mysterious in equal measures — like Ariel in The Little Mermaid combing her hair with her fork.
He is dumb as heck, and that works for him and voters alike.
The liberal take on Trump’s stupidity always focuses on the embarrassment of it. The difficulty for them lies in bemoaning how dumb he is, without ever being able to admit just how dumb he is. The fact that someone with the cognitive wherewithal of a ye olde village oaf that also used to party at Studio 54 became President is something that can never truly be acknowledged by the seppo politico class without causing the whole house of cards to come tumbling down.
A genocidal, racist, nonce-adjacent rapist, Trump is, like every American President that has ever existed, a great evil that should be violently and swiftly exterminated. Yet unlike Obama, Bush, or my personal favourite, Nixon, he exists by virtue of a vacuousness that can not be recreated, repeated, or really even riffed on. He may well be the strangest human being alive right now — maybe the strangest to ever live! There is nothing inside him but a borderline otherworldly otherness that has undoubtedly dogged him his whole life, a kinda solipsistic purposelessness that is almost impossible to fathom for anyone who takes politics ‘seriously,’ or anyone who has ever experienced even a teardrop’s worth of self doubt.
Hence his excitability at the drive-thru. The act of dipping fries into the deep-fryer takes on a meditative quality for a man whose thoughts are solely of himself — like raking a zen garden, or knitting a hat.
“I’m having a lot of fun here, everybody!” he calls out, and you can clearly see he is. His excitement is palpable:
“Well, this is a great job to take at the beginning. It requires expertise, I’m going through the french fry stuff, it's a whole…it’s a whole big process, and it requires great expertise, actually, if you do it right and you do it, and you do it fast…”
He’s being taught a new skill. He’s doing something with his hands. He is learning. Do you think his father ever taught him how to ride a bike? To fish? To tie his shoes? I remember thinking he probably didn’t know how to drive, until I saw this…
Preparing fast food is something that makes sense to him, finally. There are systems you have to follow, and unlike the systems of, say, being the Commander-in-Chief, they aren’t at all murky or tedious or overwhelming. The goals and the feedback are immediate: you fry the fries, you put them in the box, you put the box in the bag, and you hand them to the customer. It is clean. It is fun. It is beautiful.
As are the customers. He greets everyone who pulls up with a “wow, that’s a great looking guy” and “you’re a good looking family.” He’s smiling and waving and boasting about how their meals are “on him.” The entire thing was a pre-rehearsed, highly controlled affair of course, but still, he definitely believes he is living out something akin to a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, and who are we to tell him otherwise? Who are you to burst the bubble boy’s bubble?
The McDonald’s company itself had nothing to do with this, releasing a memo to distance themselves from it, somewhat. “As we’ve seen, our brand has been a fixture of conversation this election cycle. While we’ve not sought this, it’s a testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans,” the memo read. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President. We are not red or blue — we are golden.”
“Upon learning of the former President’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone.”
McDonald’s is the closest we’ll ever get to realising the American Utopia, and it is a hellish thing. The golden arches are to America what the swastika is to the Germans, and Trump has wrapped himself in both of them, to various degrees of success and excess. He is a McDonald’s fanboy, afterall. When he bought McDonald’s for the townsfolk of East Palestine, Ohio, after a train carrying hazardous materials derailed there, he joked with the woman working the register, “I know this menu better than you do. I probably know it better than anybody here.”
Just about every Trump-era tell all memoir alludes to Maccas. In his autobiography, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner joked that he knew Trump was beating the coronavirus when he requested his favourite McDoanld’s order: “Big Mac, Fillet-O-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake.” Politico reported that in 2016, his former bodyguard and confidante Keith Schiller would regularly go on a Maccas run for his boss: “if the White House kitchen staff couldn’t match the satisfaction of a quarter-pounder with cheese (no pickles, extra ketchup) and a fried apple pie.”
His love of fast food may be the most normalish thing about this deeply abnormal man, even if it is grounded in his Howard Hughes-ian style germophobia. “You’re better off going there than someplace you have no idea where the food is coming from,” he told CNN in 2016. Just look at the glee on his face when he realises the food “never touches the human hand.” This is his ‘Happy Place.’ His ideal world is a rubber-matted play area where the birthday boy gets to wear a little crown while wolfing down a McFlurry. He is thinking about this month’s Happy Meal toys, and little else.
It is 2024 and people are still asking “who” and “what” Donald Trump is, and “how” did he come about, when it’s right on display like the options on a drive-thru menu. Trump is a thickshake. Trump is chicken nuggets. Trump is a quarterpounder. Trump is Grimace — a vaguely indefinable blob that should not exist but does, if only as a mascot for an empire running on blood and slavery.
A cartoon, sure, but heck! There he is, walking amongst us, leaning out of drive-thru windows to hand you your order, his veneers sparkling in the noon-day sun, his face a mask of make-up not unlike Ronald McDonald’s himself: a true American hamburger man, whose blood runs thick with boiling grease, chasing nothing but the satisfaction of a quarter-pounder with cheese (no pickles, extra ketchup), and a fried apple pie, beautiful!
